11 ms·

Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

128 points by taylorlunt 1y ago

alephnerd 1y ago
This is cyclical to a certain extent. The same thing happened during Dot Bomb, the Great Recession, and even 2018-20. Paul G's early blogposts on "ramen profitability" and entrepreneurship hold credence in these kinds of times, as these rightsizing moments do open opportunities to build challengers. Behemoths like FB, PANW, SNOW, and SFDC were founded during the aftermath of the dot bomb and behemoths like Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession. Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships.
- gishglish 1y ago
  > Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession. Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships. Oh great! I can’t wait for the next generation of unnecessary luxury apps that just provide another lazier way to be a good consoomer. All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible.
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    Okay, I'll bite. > All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible. What does this have to do with Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe?
    - gishglish 1y ago
      Bread and circuses
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  - bigbuppo 1y ago
    So, all these people laid off from big companies that were doing real non-chatbot AI and ML research combined with robotics or other machine control to do things that would have changed the world for the better if the project hadn't been killed because it was only making zero billion dollars (the $999,999,999.99 they brought in doesn't count), are perfectly capable of working some place else that wants to, you know, do that farming thing they were working on, or shift gears to building machines that make housing affordable by reducing the labor costs by 75%.
zwnow 1y ago
It also caused the "Golden Age of Programming". It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. So if their needs change, obviously the industry changes. This article has nothing to say really.
- techpineapple 1y ago
  Yeah, it says these aren’t a result of the economy, but they’re obviously the result of the economy? I think the difference is just that big tech has bigger boom/bust cycles than most other industries(at least for now) but I wonder if other world-changing industries; like rail were the same, lots of rail companies went under, probably causing a glut of unemployment for certain types of skilled labor. On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?
  - zwnow 1y ago
    I remember a documentary on people that had no work a while back. It was filmed in a town where sailing boomed. Nowadays there are almost no sailors left, lots of them never learned a different job. And we still need sailors nowadays. Same with mining/miners. Booming industries will always die out eventually.
- rkozik1989 1y ago
  >It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber security, but people all of the world suddenly were able to learn how to code and all the needed was an Internet connection. Frankly, all this nonsense about money, total compensation, etc. is the cancer that killed programming.
  - lokar 1y ago
esafak 1y ago
Big tech g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶o̶u̶s̶l̶y̶ lavishly supported programmers for a whole generation. This is something to be happy about.
- epolanski 1y ago
  Don't be naive, there was neither generosity nor support, it was always about business: talent was scarce and plenty of competition for it existed. Thus compensation kept going up. The "generous" overlords didn't think twice about cutting tens of thousands of developers to please wall street, even if financially there wasn't the smallest need for it.
  - esafak 1y ago
    Adam Smith: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. I am not using the word generous in the unselfish sense, but the large, abundant sense. Apologies for any confusion.
    - cwmoore 1y ago
      Not the clearest word choice, is it? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generous https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generous
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  I wouldn't call it generosity - it's supply and demand like anything else. There is money to be made from tech products, whether that's software itself or anything (i.e. almost everything) containing software. There is a limited supply of good developers with the skill/experience to develop complex products and ones with high reliability requirements. It'll be interesting to see how the use of AI-based software development tools plays out, and affects the job market, but so far - together with offshoring - it seems to be mainly a matter of limiting entry level opportunities. Whether this persists or not remains to be seen - companies seem to be hoping/expecting that AI will let them cope with fewer entry level developers, but given that currently you need a human to use the tool it's not clear to what extent that is actually true. Trump has recently, somewhat unexpectedly, been making noises about offshoring and H1B developers - saying that US companies need to be more patriotic in their hiring practices. It remains to be seen if this will progress from bullying to actual policy/law changes, but a reversal of offshoring would do a lot to improve the US job market for developers, especially entry level.
mikert89 1y ago
No it was venture capital and low interest rates
- izzydata 1y ago
  This seems to the case from what I've seen. The economy was doing great and federal interests rates were practically non-existant. It was the age of free money which big tech took advantage of to higher a lot of people and gave big salaries to keep the best of people. Perhaps just to prevent competition. I think it is not accurate to say big tech was being generous or that it is their fault it stopped. This is capitalism doing what capitalism does. Taking advantage of the economy at any given moment.
jeffbee 1y ago
The author doesn't appear to have any industry experience whatsoever, which might have contributed to the post being a series of baseless assertions, followed by a non sequitur.
- mjr00 1y ago
  From the main site it appears they've been working full-time since 2021, after graduating. Which is, from their perspective, pretty brutal. Imagine spending 4-5 years at university watching people slightly older than you getting $250k TC offers at BigTech right out of school, then as soon as you graduate the rug is pulled, hiring freezes up and you're stuck at a no-name dev shop getting paid a much more modest salary. I can understand their frustration.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- alephnerd 1y ago
  The author seems to have some experience, but they are early career AND in Canada (which is a hard market to land a well paying tech job even at the best of times). Feeling despondent when facing such a double whammy seems unsurprising.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    An HTML jockey who gets to call himself "full-stack" because they let him run the mysql server doesn't have the experience necessary to deride the careers of the roughly quarter million technical staff at the large companies as "fake work".
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      No offense, but as a SWE turned PM turned VC, you're all code monkeys to me anyhow. Dissing someone as a "HTML jockey" is just rude. People need to start somewhere, and the class of 20 and 21 had a horrid job market because of early COVID hiring freezes - it recovered for class of 22 but tanked immediately afterwards. I don't deny that I dislike his opinion on "fake work", but you are falling into the same trap as well. All work is equally important, but wages are a result of a skills arbitrage, so demeaning any kind of work is just plain dumb. And luck does play a role - class of 08 never recovered financially, unlike class of 07 and class of 09. If you miss the train, it sucks.
gooch 1y ago
Starts with "It's not the result of regular cycles of employment or the economy." Goes on to describe a classic business cycle.
overstood 1y ago
Times aren’t tight, the premise of this article is flawed. Big tech is insanely profitable and investors are loving it. The cuts are not a hard necessity but a choice made for a different reason.
- donatj 1y ago
  This. The cuts were made for short-term stock gains over long-term viability. It's absurd.
- cptskippy 1y ago
  In the last 30 years the frequency of layoffs from major tech firms has been accelerating. Starting back in 1997 with Apple, through the dot-com bubble, recession, real-estate crisis, pandemic, and post-pandemic the justifications have varied from boom-bust cycles, post acquisition restructurings, to not meeting market expectations. These layoffs have been intermixed with major hiring booms, the most recent around AI. Many folks are aware of these cycles, but having worked for a non-profit I can say we're always the first to feel and last to recover from any fiscal belt tightening. Right now we're starting the fiscal belt tightening phase and anticipating we'll have to do layoffs in the fall. I'm not sure when this golden age occurred exactly...
jollyllama 1y ago
This article is meaningless because there's not a single number to distinguish the claims being made.
wiseowise 1y ago
Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming by *checks notes* creating it in the first place?
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  The time most see as being the "golden age" was in the 1990's, before many of these big tech companies existed. Or at the very least, before all of them truly got to be "big" tech.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    > The time most see as being the "golden age" was in the 1990's I think everyone's idea of the "golden age" of programming happens to coincide when they were young and everything was exciting. Ask people of different ages and you'll get different answers.
    - DaSHacka 1y ago
      I don't agree, I was born in the 2000s and I still think the 90s (or 80s) was the golden age of computing at large (and programming, with it). So many dedicated, intelligent people who loved computing for computing's sake. The opportunities they created from that mentality attracted a ton of business-eyed bros with no appreciated of technologists that slowly rotted the industry into what we have today. Whenever setting up a system and dealing with sluggish 500MB electron apps filled with slow-loading JS and baked-in ads, I wish I could go back to the time when systems were simpler and made by intelligent people that actually cared, at least more than they do now. Sure I have a fondness and nostalgia for the games and tech I grew up with (in the 2010s) like the Wii, 3DS, Windows 7, Poptropica, Club Penguin, and the earlyish iteration of Chromebooks we used in Elementary school, but I can't even try to lie by claiming they have anywhere *near* the soul of the games and systems that came before. I have no idea what the real 'culture' of nerds and hackers was like in the 90s, I can only go by people's first-hand accounts. However, I've had plenty of opportunities to interact with the technology from that era, and can't even imagine arguing what we have now is of a better 'quality', even if more technologically advanced.
freedomben 1y ago
This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two). > For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool. Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed? It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. Yes, they want to hire the best engineers they can find and they will pay handsomely for it. Every company (even our small non-profit) wants to hire the best engineers we can find. It's not "corporate greed" or us wanting to control the talent pool.
- ecb_penguin 1y ago
  Sure, all those things could be "corporate greed". Opposite actions in different environments don't change the intent. > Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences. > blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? They explained their argument. > Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably. > Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? They explained their argument in the article > Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed? It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
  - tickettotranai 1y ago
    If your framing is unfalsifiable, I question its utility.
    - 1y ago
nosefrog 1y ago
My first programming job in SF paid $60k/year 10 years ago. I'd like to thank big tech for driving salaries up.
- chubot 1y ago
  Yeah I mean I have to thank Facebook, because I was at Google in 2011. Anyone remember when Google raised the entire company's salary, maybe 30K or 60K people at that point, something like 20-25% all at once? Eric Schmidt and Laszlo Block got on stage and told the whole company how great we are, so they want to keep us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... We learned later that was because Facebook didn't participate in the Steve Jobs-initiated cartel of Google-Apple-Pixar-Adobe-Intuit-LucasFilm-eBay Eric and Laszlo of course made no mention of the collusion that turned out be illegal
- nsxwolf 1y ago
  Are you sure your experience didn’t drive your salary up?
- dehrmann 1y ago
  In 2015? That seems low for an entry-level job at a startup, then. $60k is more like 2010.
  - nosefrog 1y ago
    It was low. I got a bump to 90k that year, then 130k when I jumped companies, which I thought was a mind boggling amount. Do entry level devs even get out of bed for $130k these days?
mathattack 1y ago
It's supply and demand. It could also be a 4X increase in grads for Computer and Information Sciences degrees since the 90s. Source: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/Search?query=computer%20science&query2=computer%20science&resultType=all&page=1&sortBy=relevance&overlayDigestTableId=202715 https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/Search?query=computer%20science&qu...
- bogdan 1y ago
  How does this correlate to job demand? I imagine demand is on par if not higher.
  - mathattack 1y ago
    Good question. A couple caveats on the data: 1 - These #s are just domestic. 2 - They don't contain near-CS degrees like math and .electrical engineering (which may not have grown as much) 3 - They leave out bootcamps and similar training programs. 4 - Domestic only. My (only slightly educated) guess is that many US based CS grads who used to go to internal IT jobs are now at tech companies. CS grads from India and elsewhere now take up most of the internal IT positions due to outsourcing. I asked Perplexity [0] and they said that from 2000 to today software engineering emnployment went from 680K to 1.53MM. That's closer to 2.25X. Maybe it rises to 3X if you back up to 1995. [0] - https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-software-engineering-Rfi4QKpaQqO2PA_f2PNI4w https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-software-engineeri...
- Aperocky 1y ago
  There's only a 4x increase? I think the amount of positions have increased by far more than that.
paxys 1y ago
These big tech companies are collectively hiring thousands of software engineers every week. Smaller companies and startups are hiring tens of thousands more. If you can't get a job, that's on you.
llm_nerd 1y ago
If I get the contention of the article right, big tech was so greedy that they hired lots of people they didn't need, and paid them tonnes of money. I feel like I'm massively misunderstanding either the submission, or the definition of greed. This industry is cyclical -- I mean, most industries outside of the absolute core like healthcare are cyclical -- and there are booms and busts. Everyone hires when everyone else is hiring. Every holds steady when everyone else is holding steady. But by far the hugest influence right now is AI, and it is having a calamitous impact on everything. There is this broad industry feeling right now that such massive shifts are not only coming, they're already underway, that there is a wait and see sense all over the place.
bigbuppo 1y ago
And what's that core business again? Collecting as much data as you can on your users and then using that to sell ads, or possibly the data itself.
lokar 1y ago
I’ve seen this claim that Google and others had some plan to over hire. From my time there that was not the case. There was the natural demand for more people on existing projects and lots of (often good) ideas for new projects. The money just poured in. We could never actually hire close to the approved levels. Internal “fights” were over actual people, not headcount, everyone had tons of open headcount. I think there was just so much money, revenue growth and margin that management (which was dominated by engineers) just did not care. Fund everything and see what happens, why not?
- castwide 1y ago
  In my experience, it felt that way from the outside. I got solicited by five different Amazon recruiters in 2022 alone. The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind. It definitely gave me the impression of blanket hiring with the primary (if not sole) purpose of increasing headcount.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    > The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind. Big Tech hiring often focuses on candidate abilities first and then the specific job later. It's actually more efficient to do it that way than to start interviewing someone for a specific job that you discover they're not qualified for because you can match the candidate to a role after understanding where they fit in. At many Big Tech companies there's a separate team matching phase that comes after the interview. It's also helpful in general for us candidates because you can get a job without having to satisfy someone's arbitrary checklist of experience at prior companies.
    - castwide 1y ago
      I can appreciate the desire to focus on abilities first, but this felt like a shotgun approach to the same old checklist strategy. Like a crawler found my resume somewhere on the web based on a few keywords, and the recruiter couldn't even tell me what the keywords were.
  - 1y ago
throwaw12 1y ago
Big Tech is not the root cause. Big Tech and empire builders there followed the classic business rules, additionally highly encouraged by Wall Street. When its cheap, grow fast, when its expensive shield the bottom line, don't make risky moves and cut the fat. People are same everywhere, you can't just put the blame on Big Tech. Other industries would do same when given opportunity
taeric 1y ago
It is hard to get passed the first paragraph here. Even if I think "big tech" does terrible things, I think blaming them for a boom/bust cycle is idiotic. Could their behavior be a big part of what we should study in knowing how to control things better in the future? Almost certainly. Does it help to frame them as a villain? I'm far less sold on that. Especially if you don't offer any sort of path on how things could have been run better.
gchamonlive 1y ago
Never before it's been so easy to contribute to open source. A dirt cheap notebook has 16gb of ram today. We are used to it now but that's an insane amount of ram for software. Processors with 8-16 threads are the norm. There are countless options for you to deploy your stack and run your software regardless of database or persistent storage layer. You have so much, just sooo much free content to make you a better programmer in virtually any language, that for those you don't you can just... ask an LLM. We have LLMs, Linux is stronger than ever, there is just so much stuff going on, I don't know what you guys are talking about with "the end of golden age for programming". The golden age is NOW. Maybe it's just the end of the golden age for capitalism for those seeking to become filthy rich? In any case, if you buy into this crap talk about how the golden age is over all you are going to do is being left behind.
hollowonepl 1y ago
I’m not buying this at all. Good people always find job, and if you don’t you need to work on better network or better skills or both. Author by the picture looks young. Maybe passionate about programming but lacking fundamental life experience that could let him look beyond personalization and typical socialistic view of bad corporations intentionally damaging job markets as targeted goal.. that’s just nonsense
Aperocky 1y ago
The discussion here reminded me of a funny (but probably true) anecdote where all you had to do to actually get working answer from stackoverflow (RIP) is to create an answer that is blatantly wrong. You'll have people of knowledge descending on that question in no time to refute your heresy.
lbrito 1y ago
Meh. I thought the Golden Age would be something pre web 2.0, and big tech killing it meaning walled gardens and then LLMs. The short rant in the article is really nearsighted.
falcor84 1y ago
> They wanted to monopolize talent, burned billions doing it, and then discarded those people like they were nothing. They caused the problem, and now we developers are paying for it. What's the actual issue here? Is anyone really worse off by having worked at FAANG for a few years and then being given a generous severance package? The alternative explicitly presented by the article is that if they hadn't been hired by FAANG, they would have been working at a smaller company for lower pay, or worse yet, they wouldn't have been able to get a coding job at all.
throwmeaway222 1y ago
When you pull a large portion of people that would normally be doing the following jobs: * maintenance on buildings * growing corn * building homes * making tacos at taco bell * roll your own guess And make them have job titles like "Head of Equity" or "People Partner Team Member" or "roll your own here too" and give them a 100k-200k+ salary, then everyone making Corn, Tacos, Homes are going to demand more money because why work at Taco Bell if you can literally get a job in Big Tech? It really fucked up our system, our expectations for salary, the cost of all goods really. We actually need deflation so that people can afford homes. We need to bankrupt companies that just buy up all the homes. We also need to get our heads on straight about work. We should expect to all being doing hard fucking work. There shouldn't be a lot of meetings. That's something that really surprised me about 2020-2024 - the meetings were out of fucking control. Done. Now get off HN and get to work.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  > We should expect to all being doing hard fucking work Yeah, no, lol.
  - throwmeaway222 1y ago
    man our world is so fucked. hope you enjoy ww3
xlbuttplug2 1y ago
As a mostly fraudulent software developer, I've always considered it a privilege to earn copious amounts of money sitting in my bedroom.
brianjlogan 1y ago
They didn't hire people to control labor. They were enabled to hire people for R&D because it gave them a tax loophole. https://www.techspot.com/news/108230-how-little-known-tax-change-sparked-tech-layoff.html https://www.techspot.com/news/108230-how-little-known-tax-ch... And it was removed so tech CFOs are realigning their hiring/retainment to save money on taxes.
Kapura 1y ago
Concentrated capital strikes again. Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out.
- gishglish 1y ago
  > Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out. It’s all good. The local community doesn’t need you to build out sites anymore. I quit doing that when small business owners started expressing that they didn’t need a website, it wasn’t very valuable to them. What they wanted was a nice Facebook page. If they did need a website, it seems Squarespace, Shopify, etc. provides a sufficient offering for them. Cheaper too.
  - Kapura 1y ago
    and thus, the capital spent on a squarespace website leaves that community, never to return.
abixb 1y ago
>What happened wasn't just carelessness on the part of Big Tech. It was a power move. They wanted to monopolize talent, burned billions doing it, and then discarded those people like they were nothing. They caused the problem, and now we developers are paying for it. Gives me "content written by a LLM" vibes -- the short sentence structure, the phrasing, etc., makes it appear to me that this is a bot generated or at least bot assisted content. Dead internet theory in full effect.
nsxwolf 1y ago
My bank account doesn’t remember the part where non-big tech salaries went up.
djdjnm 1y ago
[dead]
hazek112 1y ago
Also... 82% went to Indian visa recipients. The rest have been offshored as quickly as possible.
rozza 1y ago
citation needed
AndyKelley 1y ago
What a lazy and worthless analysis. It argues, poorly, that big tech created the golden age of programming until the economy destroyed it while purportedly arguing the opposite.
constantcrying 1y ago
Has the author heard of "outsourcing" before? As it turns out programming being lucrative, led to lots of programs teaching it all over the world, which in turn led to a situation, where the labor market for programmers collapsed. Hiring too many programmers is not something you do out of greed, basic economics tells you that this move increased salaries for programmers. Companies hired because they anticipated competition around talent and new projects where these developers could work profitably for the company.
waldopat 1y ago
I wish I could like this post, but it unfortunately shows a lack of historical framing. So, as an elder millennial, I thought I'd backfill with some data from the 1990s onward. (I'm a bit of a management/tech history nerd as well and studied it in grad school) TL:DR; The precarity of knowledge workers is not new and it happens every 3-5 years, though it sure feels like it's getting more common. 1991-1993: IBM laid off 120,000 white collar workers, the largest in history. AT&T and DEC also restructured. 1995-1996: Telecom and PC layoffs as labor shifted abroad and JIT management becomes dominant 2000–2002: Perhaps the first example of over hiring at the end of the 1990s (echoing the ZIRP era) and then massive layoffs with the Dot-com bust 2008–2010: Widespread layoffs across Big Tech and startups with the Great Recession. 2012–2015: Companies like Microsoft, HP, and IBM shed tens of thousands with post-mobile restructuring. 2020: Travel/service tech (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) were hit hard due to COVID shock. 2022–2024: The current wave we’re living through with Post-ZIRP and AI pivots. If you're looking for books or articles, Gina Neff, Stephen Barley or Gideon Kunda have some of the oldest. In short, there is no real difference between then and now: Instability is hitting workers who genuinely thought they had made it.
rvz 1y ago
No it did not. It killed the golden age of mediocre software developers, which includes the over inflated role of web development which that can be safely done by LLMs.
- barnabee 1y ago
  Yep, it should be no surprise that things that ought to require no code or very little code but currently require tons of it are not safe long term careers for programmers. If we can make self driving taxis, we can also make putting documents on the internet not require tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript.
- Hilift 1y ago
  Around 1999, eBay code was c++ compiled into a "ebayisapi.dll". It became too large for x86. I'm guessing it had lots of COM+ and must have been a disaster, bodies everywhere. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs330/2007fa/slides/eBaySDForum2006-11-29.pdf https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs330/2007fa/slides/eBayS...
  - gishglish 1y ago
    Oh man, was it implemented as an ISAPI extension? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the wild.
    - Hilift 1y ago
      Something like 4 million lines of code with hundreds of people working on the same thing. It was converted to Java by 2002 so they knew it was a crisis.
jleyank 1y ago
To me the golden age of programming was the 60’s and 70’s when gods walked the earth who thought up pretty much all of the stuff we use or do. Networking, operating systems, languages, …. Hackers, for the most part, did it because it scratched their itch or because it helped out a buddy. Or demonstrated their powers in the appropriate way. Nobody counted money and it was funded by the government mostly. But it created the basis of where the HN readership lives. And I’m always frustrated that I missed participating in it.
deleted 1y ago
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thisisit 1y ago
I don't think the writer is aware how regular business cycle works. It starts off with some companies in a particular industry generating great margins. Slowly more companies start joining the industry and there are still great margins. The early employees see huge jump in salaries. But with time everyone wants to pile in - both companies and people. You start seeing hype that this industry is the next big thing and you can't survive without being part of the industry. Once the industry becomes too saturated companies start exiting, people are laid off, industry services become worse etc etc. Nearly every industry goes through this boom and bust, spring and winters. Most destruction leads to a new spring. Software has seen two springs though. First, the dotcom boom. During the dotcom boom lots of OPEX was spent on undersea cable because everyone was going to use these new fangled "websites". But after the 2000s crash the data prices crashed and it led to the 2013-2020/21 boom. We have to see where things go from here. The same thing is happening in AI. It is started off with some companies making good margins, there are huge salaries being doled out to early AI experts and give it enough time the market will be chockful of AI related stuff and also going down. That time we can see similar commentaries about how golden age of AI was killed due to greed.
krapp 1y ago
I would argue that the "Golden Age of Programming" came about due to the existence of Javascript and the ubiquity of the web, introducing the masses to a simple, easy to use development and distribution environment. Also that brief time when free web hosts like Tripod offered CGI access and scripting. The rise and fall of programming as a job in Silicon Valley is a separate but related phenomenon. A gold rush, but not a golden age. To that end, when corporate interests commoditized the web and everything became too complex and javascript got treated as bytecode and required a package manager and toolchain, the golden age was absolutely killed by big tech.
maxdo 1y ago
It’s a bit naïve—almost a textbook neo-western, ego-centric mindset—where everything is attributed to a brilliant personality, and all setbacks are blamed on some mysterious villains. But in reality, market forces explain it more cleanly—think corporate priorities and shifting strategies, not just “evil managers.” It’s simpler than it seems. In the past, growing a tech company meant building more products and features, which required more people. That’s how you scaled. Now, in the AI era, growth often means more GPUs and a smaller, highly skilled team solving business problems. The pattern of investment has shifted. It’s not about corporate greed—it’s about evolving models of efficiency.
davidw 1y ago
More than anything, I miss hacking on cool stuff without quite so much "corporate" involved. I grew up with the open source culture of the 90ies, when people were going to change the world. And they did! Things like Linux are ubiquitous. There were certainly problems with that era: misogyny ran rampant and people could be dicks, but we were still also kind of off in our little world without the spotlight that the web and lots of huge companies built on it brought to things. I'm no RMS and I enjoy making good money, but I'm fine with 'good' money and don't need crazy money, and miss that kind of happier, more curious era with no 6 month performance review cycle kinds of shit. That doesn't mean ignoring business goals; I was very happy when I worked for a company doing fundus cameras in Italy just 10 years ago - that was such a smart group of people, and very oriented towards making the product the best that it could be. But there were a lot of cool things to hack on and not much to get in the way of doing that.
sylvainr65 1y ago
Still hiring every other months in my company. Hard to find real talented developers. My guest : most of them are already employed. This article does not reflect my reality at all.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
The title is "Big Tech killed the Golden Age of Programming" But the author spends zero time explaining why he thinks internet-based data collection and surveillance is the "Golden Age" of programming. A golden age, according to one definition, is a period of "peak achievement" What exactly is the author's concept of achievement Perhaps it is financial (not programming) For example, the period may have been noteworthy for the so-called "tech" industry's ability to pay so many salaries from zero interest loans Historically, data shows that interest rates fluctuate over time (Can we blame Big Tech for an increase in interest rates) With respect to _programming_ some agree that innovation, improvement, progress, was actually stalled during this period (and still is) due to Big Tech's anti-competitive practices From this end user's perspective the software created during this period, what the author calls a period of "fake jobs", is not the pinnacle of achievement in programming To me, software quality is at an all-time low, and this "Big Tech" period does not stand as a "Golden Age of Programming" Compared to the software I am using originally created in the 1970s it stinks But opinions may differ
laacz 1y ago
Author admits that this was AI generated slop: https://www.taylor.gl/blog/30 https://www.taylor.gl/blog/30

128 points by taylorlunt 1y ago

This is cyclical to a certain extent. The same thing happened during Dot Bomb, the Great Recession, and even 2018-20. Paul G's early blogposts on "ramen profitability" and entrepreneurship hold credence in these kinds of times, as these rightsizing moments do open opportunities to build challengers. Behemoths like FB, PANW, SNOW, and SFDC were founded during the aftermath of the dot bomb and behemoths like Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession. Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships.

gishglish 1y ago
> Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession. Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships. Oh great! I can’t wait for the next generation of unnecessary luxury apps that just provide another lazier way to be a good consoomer. All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Okay, I'll bite. > All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible. What does this have to do with Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe?
  - gishglish 1y ago
    Bread and circuses
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- bigbuppo 1y ago
  So, all these people laid off from big companies that were doing real non-chatbot AI and ML research combined with robotics or other machine control to do things that would have changed the world for the better if the project hadn't been killed because it was only making zero billion dollars (the $999,999,999.99 they brought in doesn't count), are perfectly capable of working some place else that wants to, you know, do that farming thing they were working on, or shift gears to building machines that make housing affordable by reducing the labor costs by 75%.

zwnow 1y ago

It also caused the "Golden Age of Programming". It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. So if their needs change, obviously the industry changes. This article has nothing to say really.

techpineapple 1y ago
Yeah, it says these aren’t a result of the economy, but they’re obviously the result of the economy? I think the difference is just that big tech has bigger boom/bust cycles than most other industries(at least for now) but I wonder if other world-changing industries; like rail were the same, lots of rail companies went under, probably causing a glut of unemployment for certain types of skilled labor. On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?
- zwnow 1y ago
  I remember a documentary on people that had no work a while back. It was filmed in a town where sailing boomed. Nowadays there are almost no sailors left, lots of them never learned a different job. And we still need sailors nowadays. Same with mining/miners. Booming industries will always die out eventually.
rkozik1989 1y ago
>It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber security, but people all of the world suddenly were able to learn how to code and all the needed was an Internet connection. Frankly, all this nonsense about money, total compensation, etc. is the cancer that killed programming.
- lokar 1y ago

esafak 1y ago

Big tech g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶o̶u̶s̶l̶y̶ lavishly supported programmers for a whole generation. This is something to be happy about.

epolanski 1y ago
Don't be naive, there was neither generosity nor support, it was always about business: talent was scarce and plenty of competition for it existed. Thus compensation kept going up. The "generous" overlords didn't think twice about cutting tens of thousands of developers to please wall street, even if financially there wasn't the smallest need for it.
- esafak 1y ago
  Adam Smith: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. I am not using the word generous in the unselfish sense, but the large, abundant sense. Apologies for any confusion.
  - cwmoore 1y ago
    Not the clearest word choice, is it? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generous https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generous
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
I wouldn't call it generosity - it's supply and demand like anything else. There is money to be made from tech products, whether that's software itself or anything (i.e. almost everything) containing software. There is a limited supply of good developers with the skill/experience to develop complex products and ones with high reliability requirements. It'll be interesting to see how the use of AI-based software development tools plays out, and affects the job market, but so far - together with offshoring - it seems to be mainly a matter of limiting entry level opportunities. Whether this persists or not remains to be seen - companies seem to be hoping/expecting that AI will let them cope with fewer entry level developers, but given that currently you need a human to use the tool it's not clear to what extent that is actually true. Trump has recently, somewhat unexpectedly, been making noises about offshoring and H1B developers - saying that US companies need to be more patriotic in their hiring practices. It remains to be seen if this will progress from bullying to actual policy/law changes, but a reversal of offshoring would do a lot to improve the US job market for developers, especially entry level.

mikert89 1y ago

No it was venture capital and low interest rates

izzydata 1y ago
This seems to the case from what I've seen. The economy was doing great and federal interests rates were practically non-existant. It was the age of free money which big tech took advantage of to higher a lot of people and gave big salaries to keep the best of people. Perhaps just to prevent competition. I think it is not accurate to say big tech was being generous or that it is their fault it stopped. This is capitalism doing what capitalism does. Taking advantage of the economy at any given moment.

jeffbee 1y ago

The author doesn't appear to have any industry experience whatsoever, which might have contributed to the post being a series of baseless assertions, followed by a non sequitur.

mjr00 1y ago
From the main site it appears they've been working full-time since 2021, after graduating. Which is, from their perspective, pretty brutal. Imagine spending 4-5 years at university watching people slightly older than you getting $250k TC offers at BigTech right out of school, then as soon as you graduate the rug is pulled, hiring freezes up and you're stuck at a no-name dev shop getting paid a much more modest salary. I can understand their frustration.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
alephnerd 1y ago
The author seems to have some experience, but they are early career AND in Canada (which is a hard market to land a well paying tech job even at the best of times). Feeling despondent when facing such a double whammy seems unsurprising.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  An HTML jockey who gets to call himself "full-stack" because they let him run the mysql server doesn't have the experience necessary to deride the careers of the roughly quarter million technical staff at the large companies as "fake work".
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    No offense, but as a SWE turned PM turned VC, you're all code monkeys to me anyhow. Dissing someone as a "HTML jockey" is just rude. People need to start somewhere, and the class of 20 and 21 had a horrid job market because of early COVID hiring freezes - it recovered for class of 22 but tanked immediately afterwards. I don't deny that I dislike his opinion on "fake work", but you are falling into the same trap as well. All work is equally important, but wages are a result of a skills arbitrage, so demeaning any kind of work is just plain dumb. And luck does play a role - class of 08 never recovered financially, unlike class of 07 and class of 09. If you miss the train, it sucks.

gooch 1y ago

Starts with "It's not the result of regular cycles of employment or the economy." Goes on to describe a classic business cycle.

overstood 1y ago

Times aren’t tight, the premise of this article is flawed. Big tech is insanely profitable and investors are loving it. The cuts are not a hard necessity but a choice made for a different reason.

donatj 1y ago
This. The cuts were made for short-term stock gains over long-term viability. It's absurd.
cptskippy 1y ago
In the last 30 years the frequency of layoffs from major tech firms has been accelerating. Starting back in 1997 with Apple, through the dot-com bubble, recession, real-estate crisis, pandemic, and post-pandemic the justifications have varied from boom-bust cycles, post acquisition restructurings, to not meeting market expectations. These layoffs have been intermixed with major hiring booms, the most recent around AI. Many folks are aware of these cycles, but having worked for a non-profit I can say we're always the first to feel and last to recover from any fiscal belt tightening. Right now we're starting the fiscal belt tightening phase and anticipating we'll have to do layoffs in the fall. I'm not sure when this golden age occurred exactly...

jollyllama 1y ago

This article is meaningless because there's not a single number to distinguish the claims being made.

wiseowise 1y ago

Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming by *checks notes* creating it in the first place?

DaSHacka 1y ago
The time most see as being the "golden age" was in the 1990's, before many of these big tech companies existed. Or at the very least, before all of them truly got to be "big" tech.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > The time most see as being the "golden age" was in the 1990's I think everyone's idea of the "golden age" of programming happens to coincide when they were young and everything was exciting. Ask people of different ages and you'll get different answers.
  - DaSHacka 1y ago
    I don't agree, I was born in the 2000s and I still think the 90s (or 80s) was the golden age of computing at large (and programming, with it). So many dedicated, intelligent people who loved computing for computing's sake. The opportunities they created from that mentality attracted a ton of business-eyed bros with no appreciated of technologists that slowly rotted the industry into what we have today. Whenever setting up a system and dealing with sluggish 500MB electron apps filled with slow-loading JS and baked-in ads, I wish I could go back to the time when systems were simpler and made by intelligent people that actually cared, at least more than they do now. Sure I have a fondness and nostalgia for the games and tech I grew up with (in the 2010s) like the Wii, 3DS, Windows 7, Poptropica, Club Penguin, and the earlyish iteration of Chromebooks we used in Elementary school, but I can't even try to lie by claiming they have anywhere *near* the soul of the games and systems that came before. I have no idea what the real 'culture' of nerds and hackers was like in the 90s, I can only go by people's first-hand accounts. However, I've had plenty of opportunities to interact with the technology from that era, and can't even imagine arguing what we have now is of a better 'quality', even if more technologically advanced.

freedomben 1y ago

This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two). > For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool. Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed? It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. Yes, they want to hire the best engineers they can find and they will pay handsomely for it. Every company (even our small non-profit) wants to hire the best engineers we can find. It's not "corporate greed" or us wanting to control the talent pool.

ecb_penguin 1y ago
Sure, all those things could be "corporate greed". Opposite actions in different environments don't change the intent. > Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences. > blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? They explained their argument. > Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably. > Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? They explained their argument in the article > Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed? It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
- tickettotranai 1y ago
  If your framing is unfalsifiable, I question its utility.
  - 1y ago

nosefrog 1y ago

My first programming job in SF paid $60k/year 10 years ago. I'd like to thank big tech for driving salaries up.

chubot 1y ago
Yeah I mean I have to thank Facebook, because I was at Google in 2011. Anyone remember when Google raised the entire company's salary, maybe 30K or 60K people at that point, something like 20-25% all at once? Eric Schmidt and Laszlo Block got on stage and told the whole company how great we are, so they want to keep us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... We learned later that was because Facebook didn't participate in the Steve Jobs-initiated cartel of Google-Apple-Pixar-Adobe-Intuit-LucasFilm-eBay Eric and Laszlo of course made no mention of the collusion that turned out be illegal
nsxwolf 1y ago
Are you sure your experience didn’t drive your salary up?
dehrmann 1y ago
In 2015? That seems low for an entry-level job at a startup, then. $60k is more like 2010.
- nosefrog 1y ago
  It was low. I got a bump to 90k that year, then 130k when I jumped companies, which I thought was a mind boggling amount. Do entry level devs even get out of bed for $130k these days?

mathattack 1y ago

It's supply and demand. It could also be a 4X increase in grads for Computer and Information Sciences degrees since the 90s. Source: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/Search?query=computer%20science&query2=computer%20science&resultType=all&page=1&sortBy=relevance&overlayDigestTableId=202715 https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/Search?query=computer%20science&qu...

bogdan 1y ago
How does this correlate to job demand? I imagine demand is on par if not higher.
- mathattack 1y ago
  Good question. A couple caveats on the data: 1 - These #s are just domestic. 2 - They don't contain near-CS degrees like math and .electrical engineering (which may not have grown as much) 3 - They leave out bootcamps and similar training programs. 4 - Domestic only. My (only slightly educated) guess is that many US based CS grads who used to go to internal IT jobs are now at tech companies. CS grads from India and elsewhere now take up most of the internal IT positions due to outsourcing. I asked Perplexity [0] and they said that from 2000 to today software engineering emnployment went from 680K to 1.53MM. That's closer to 2.25X. Maybe it rises to 3X if you back up to 1995. [0] - https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-software-engineering-Rfi4QKpaQqO2PA_f2PNI4w https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-software-engineeri...
Aperocky 1y ago
There's only a 4x increase? I think the amount of positions have increased by far more than that.

paxys 1y ago

These big tech companies are collectively hiring thousands of software engineers every week. Smaller companies and startups are hiring tens of thousands more. If you can't get a job, that's on you.

llm_nerd 1y ago

If I get the contention of the article right, big tech was so greedy that they hired lots of people they didn't need, and paid them tonnes of money. I feel like I'm massively misunderstanding either the submission, or the definition of greed. This industry is cyclical -- I mean, most industries outside of the absolute core like healthcare are cyclical -- and there are booms and busts. Everyone hires when everyone else is hiring. Every holds steady when everyone else is holding steady. But by far the hugest influence right now is AI, and it is having a calamitous impact on everything. There is this broad industry feeling right now that such massive shifts are not only coming, they're already underway, that there is a wait and see sense all over the place.

bigbuppo 1y ago

And what's that core business again? Collecting as much data as you can on your users and then using that to sell ads, or possibly the data itself.

lokar 1y ago

I’ve seen this claim that Google and others had some plan to over hire. From my time there that was not the case. There was the natural demand for more people on existing projects and lots of (often good) ideas for new projects. The money just poured in. We could never actually hire close to the approved levels. Internal “fights” were over actual people, not headcount, everyone had tons of open headcount. I think there was just so much money, revenue growth and margin that management (which was dominated by engineers) just did not care. Fund everything and see what happens, why not?

castwide 1y ago
In my experience, it felt that way from the outside. I got solicited by five different Amazon recruiters in 2022 alone. The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind. It definitely gave me the impression of blanket hiring with the primary (if not sole) purpose of increasing headcount.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind. Big Tech hiring often focuses on candidate abilities first and then the specific job later. It's actually more efficient to do it that way than to start interviewing someone for a specific job that you discover they're not qualified for because you can match the candidate to a role after understanding where they fit in. At many Big Tech companies there's a separate team matching phase that comes after the interview. It's also helpful in general for us candidates because you can get a job without having to satisfy someone's arbitrary checklist of experience at prior companies.
  - castwide 1y ago
    I can appreciate the desire to focus on abilities first, but this felt like a shotgun approach to the same old checklist strategy. Like a crawler found my resume somewhere on the web based on a few keywords, and the recruiter couldn't even tell me what the keywords were.
- 1y ago

throwaw12 1y ago

Big Tech is not the root cause. Big Tech and empire builders there followed the classic business rules, additionally highly encouraged by Wall Street. When its cheap, grow fast, when its expensive shield the bottom line, don't make risky moves and cut the fat. People are same everywhere, you can't just put the blame on Big Tech. Other industries would do same when given opportunity

taeric 1y ago

It is hard to get passed the first paragraph here. Even if I think "big tech" does terrible things, I think blaming them for a boom/bust cycle is idiotic. Could their behavior be a big part of what we should study in knowing how to control things better in the future? Almost certainly. Does it help to frame them as a villain? I'm far less sold on that. Especially if you don't offer any sort of path on how things could have been run better.

gchamonlive 1y ago

Never before it's been so easy to contribute to open source. A dirt cheap notebook has 16gb of ram today. We are used to it now but that's an insane amount of ram for software. Processors with 8-16 threads are the norm. There are countless options for you to deploy your stack and run your software regardless of database or persistent storage layer. You have so much, just sooo much free content to make you a better programmer in virtually any language, that for those you don't you can just... ask an LLM. We have LLMs, Linux is stronger than ever, there is just so much stuff going on, I don't know what you guys are talking about with "the end of golden age for programming". The golden age is NOW. Maybe it's just the end of the golden age for capitalism for those seeking to become filthy rich? In any case, if you buy into this crap talk about how the golden age is over all you are going to do is being left behind.

hollowonepl 1y ago

I’m not buying this at all. Good people always find job, and if you don’t you need to work on better network or better skills or both. Author by the picture looks young. Maybe passionate about programming but lacking fundamental life experience that could let him look beyond personalization and typical socialistic view of bad corporations intentionally damaging job markets as targeted goal.. that’s just nonsense

Aperocky 1y ago

The discussion here reminded me of a funny (but probably true) anecdote where all you had to do to actually get working answer from stackoverflow (RIP) is to create an answer that is blatantly wrong. You'll have people of knowledge descending on that question in no time to refute your heresy.

lbrito 1y ago

Meh. I thought the Golden Age would be something pre web 2.0, and big tech killing it meaning walled gardens and then LLMs. The short rant in the article is really nearsighted.

falcor84 1y ago

> They wanted to monopolize talent, burned billions doing it, and then discarded those people like they were nothing. They caused the problem, and now we developers are paying for it. What's the actual issue here? Is anyone really worse off by having worked at FAANG for a few years and then being given a generous severance package? The alternative explicitly presented by the article is that if they hadn't been hired by FAANG, they would have been working at a smaller company for lower pay, or worse yet, they wouldn't have been able to get a coding job at all.

throwmeaway222 1y ago

When you pull a large portion of people that would normally be doing the following jobs: * maintenance on buildings * growing corn * building homes * making tacos at taco bell * roll your own guess And make them have job titles like "Head of Equity" or "People Partner Team Member" or "roll your own here too" and give them a 100k-200k+ salary, then everyone making Corn, Tacos, Homes are going to demand more money because why work at Taco Bell if you can literally get a job in Big Tech? It really fucked up our system, our expectations for salary, the cost of all goods really. We actually need deflation so that people can afford homes. We need to bankrupt companies that just buy up all the homes. We also need to get our heads on straight about work. We should expect to all being doing hard fucking work. There shouldn't be a lot of meetings. That's something that really surprised me about 2020-2024 - the meetings were out of fucking control. Done. Now get off HN and get to work.

wiseowise 1y ago
> We should expect to all being doing hard fucking work Yeah, no, lol.
- throwmeaway222 1y ago
  man our world is so fucked. hope you enjoy ww3

xlbuttplug2 1y ago

As a mostly fraudulent software developer, I've always considered it a privilege to earn copious amounts of money sitting in my bedroom.

brianjlogan 1y ago

They didn't hire people to control labor. They were enabled to hire people for R&D because it gave them a tax loophole. https://www.techspot.com/news/108230-how-little-known-tax-change-sparked-tech-layoff.html https://www.techspot.com/news/108230-how-little-known-tax-ch... And it was removed so tech CFOs are realigning their hiring/retainment to save money on taxes.

Kapura 1y ago

Concentrated capital strikes again. Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out.

gishglish 1y ago
> Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out. It’s all good. The local community doesn’t need you to build out sites anymore. I quit doing that when small business owners started expressing that they didn’t need a website, it wasn’t very valuable to them. What they wanted was a nice Facebook page. If they did need a website, it seems Squarespace, Shopify, etc. provides a sufficient offering for them. Cheaper too.
- Kapura 1y ago
  and thus, the capital spent on a squarespace website leaves that community, never to return.

abixb 1y ago

>What happened wasn't just carelessness on the part of Big Tech. It was a power move. They wanted to monopolize talent, burned billions doing it, and then discarded those people like they were nothing. They caused the problem, and now we developers are paying for it. Gives me "content written by a LLM" vibes -- the short sentence structure, the phrasing, etc., makes it appear to me that this is a bot generated or at least bot assisted content. Dead internet theory in full effect.

nsxwolf 1y ago

My bank account doesn’t remember the part where non-big tech salaries went up.

djdjnm 1y ago

[dead]

hazek112 1y ago

Also... 82% went to Indian visa recipients. The rest have been offshored as quickly as possible.

rozza 1y ago

citation needed

AndyKelley 1y ago

What a lazy and worthless analysis. It argues, poorly, that big tech created the golden age of programming until the economy destroyed it while purportedly arguing the opposite.

constantcrying 1y ago

Has the author heard of "outsourcing" before? As it turns out programming being lucrative, led to lots of programs teaching it all over the world, which in turn led to a situation, where the labor market for programmers collapsed. Hiring too many programmers is not something you do out of greed, basic economics tells you that this move increased salaries for programmers. Companies hired because they anticipated competition around talent and new projects where these developers could work profitably for the company.

waldopat 1y ago

I wish I could like this post, but it unfortunately shows a lack of historical framing. So, as an elder millennial, I thought I'd backfill with some data from the 1990s onward. (I'm a bit of a management/tech history nerd as well and studied it in grad school) TL:DR; The precarity of knowledge workers is not new and it happens every 3-5 years, though it sure feels like it's getting more common. 1991-1993: IBM laid off 120,000 white collar workers, the largest in history. AT&T and DEC also restructured. 1995-1996: Telecom and PC layoffs as labor shifted abroad and JIT management becomes dominant 2000–2002: Perhaps the first example of over hiring at the end of the 1990s (echoing the ZIRP era) and then massive layoffs with the Dot-com bust 2008–2010: Widespread layoffs across Big Tech and startups with the Great Recession. 2012–2015: Companies like Microsoft, HP, and IBM shed tens of thousands with post-mobile restructuring. 2020: Travel/service tech (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) were hit hard due to COVID shock. 2022–2024: The current wave we’re living through with Post-ZIRP and AI pivots. If you're looking for books or articles, Gina Neff, Stephen Barley or Gideon Kunda have some of the oldest. In short, there is no real difference between then and now: Instability is hitting workers who genuinely thought they had made it.

rvz 1y ago

No it did not. It killed the golden age of mediocre software developers, which includes the over inflated role of web development which that can be safely done by LLMs.

barnabee 1y ago
Yep, it should be no surprise that things that ought to require no code or very little code but currently require tons of it are not safe long term careers for programmers. If we can make self driving taxis, we can also make putting documents on the internet not require tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript.
Hilift 1y ago
Around 1999, eBay code was c++ compiled into a "ebayisapi.dll". It became too large for x86. I'm guessing it had lots of COM+ and must have been a disaster, bodies everywhere. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs330/2007fa/slides/eBaySDForum2006-11-29.pdf https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs330/2007fa/slides/eBayS...
- gishglish 1y ago
  Oh man, was it implemented as an ISAPI extension? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the wild.
  - Hilift 1y ago
    Something like 4 million lines of code with hundreds of people working on the same thing. It was converted to Java by 2002 so they knew it was a crisis.

jleyank 1y ago

To me the golden age of programming was the 60’s and 70’s when gods walked the earth who thought up pretty much all of the stuff we use or do. Networking, operating systems, languages, …. Hackers, for the most part, did it because it scratched their itch or because it helped out a buddy. Or demonstrated their powers in the appropriate way. Nobody counted money and it was funded by the government mostly. But it created the basis of where the HN readership lives. And I’m always frustrated that I missed participating in it.

deleted 1y ago

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thisisit 1y ago

I don't think the writer is aware how regular business cycle works. It starts off with some companies in a particular industry generating great margins. Slowly more companies start joining the industry and there are still great margins. The early employees see huge jump in salaries. But with time everyone wants to pile in - both companies and people. You start seeing hype that this industry is the next big thing and you can't survive without being part of the industry. Once the industry becomes too saturated companies start exiting, people are laid off, industry services become worse etc etc. Nearly every industry goes through this boom and bust, spring and winters. Most destruction leads to a new spring. Software has seen two springs though. First, the dotcom boom. During the dotcom boom lots of OPEX was spent on undersea cable because everyone was going to use these new fangled "websites". But after the 2000s crash the data prices crashed and it led to the 2013-2020/21 boom. We have to see where things go from here. The same thing is happening in AI. It is started off with some companies making good margins, there are huge salaries being doled out to early AI experts and give it enough time the market will be chockful of AI related stuff and also going down. That time we can see similar commentaries about how golden age of AI was killed due to greed.

krapp 1y ago

I would argue that the "Golden Age of Programming" came about due to the existence of Javascript and the ubiquity of the web, introducing the masses to a simple, easy to use development and distribution environment. Also that brief time when free web hosts like Tripod offered CGI access and scripting. The rise and fall of programming as a job in Silicon Valley is a separate but related phenomenon. A gold rush, but not a golden age. To that end, when corporate interests commoditized the web and everything became too complex and javascript got treated as bytecode and required a package manager and toolchain, the golden age was absolutely killed by big tech.

maxdo 1y ago

It’s a bit naïve—almost a textbook neo-western, ego-centric mindset—where everything is attributed to a brilliant personality, and all setbacks are blamed on some mysterious villains. But in reality, market forces explain it more cleanly—think corporate priorities and shifting strategies, not just “evil managers.” It’s simpler than it seems. In the past, growing a tech company meant building more products and features, which required more people. That’s how you scaled. Now, in the AI era, growth often means more GPUs and a smaller, highly skilled team solving business problems. The pattern of investment has shifted. It’s not about corporate greed—it’s about evolving models of efficiency.

davidw 1y ago

More than anything, I miss hacking on cool stuff without quite so much "corporate" involved. I grew up with the open source culture of the 90ies, when people were going to change the world. And they did! Things like Linux are ubiquitous. There were certainly problems with that era: misogyny ran rampant and people could be dicks, but we were still also kind of off in our little world without the spotlight that the web and lots of huge companies built on it brought to things. I'm no RMS and I enjoy making good money, but I'm fine with 'good' money and don't need crazy money, and miss that kind of happier, more curious era with no 6 month performance review cycle kinds of shit. That doesn't mean ignoring business goals; I was very happy when I worked for a company doing fundus cameras in Italy just 10 years ago - that was such a smart group of people, and very oriented towards making the product the best that it could be. But there were a lot of cool things to hack on and not much to get in the way of doing that.

sylvainr65 1y ago

Still hiring every other months in my company. Hard to find real talented developers. My guest : most of them are already employed. This article does not reflect my reality at all.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

The title is "Big Tech killed the Golden Age of Programming" But the author spends zero time explaining why he thinks internet-based data collection and surveillance is the "Golden Age" of programming. A golden age, according to one definition, is a period of "peak achievement" What exactly is the author's concept of achievement Perhaps it is financial (not programming) For example, the period may have been noteworthy for the so-called "tech" industry's ability to pay so many salaries from zero interest loans Historically, data shows that interest rates fluctuate over time (Can we blame Big Tech for an increase in interest rates) With respect to _programming_ some agree that innovation, improvement, progress, was actually stalled during this period (and still is) due to Big Tech's anti-competitive practices From this end user's perspective the software created during this period, what the author calls a period of "fake jobs", is not the pinnacle of achievement in programming To me, software quality is at an all-time low, and this "Big Tech" period does not stand as a "Golden Age of Programming" Compared to the software I am using originally created in the 1970s it stinks But opinions may differ

laacz 1y ago

Author admits that this was AI generated slop: https://www.taylor.gl/blog/30 https://www.taylor.gl/blog/30